Recent Advances in Optically Controlled PROTAC

I am Muzi Ouyang (欧阳木子) — I go by Mia. I am a PhD candidate in Chemistry at Tsinghua University, advised by Prof. Ying Tan (谭英) at the Institute of Biopharmaceutical and Health Engineering (iBHE) in Shenzhen. I work on targeted protein degradation: designing bioPROTACs that recruit E3 ligases to destroy proteins small molecules struggle to drug — and working out why that degradation sometimes fails.

My dissertation has two halves. The first is a dual-target bioPROTAC that co-degrades ERα and PI3K p85α, re-sensitizing tamoxifen-resistant breast cancer cells to endocrine therapy. The second is a KRAS-targeting degrader, where I found a resistance mutation in the hypervariable region that lets KRAS escape a multimerization-dependent platform, and used all-atom molecular dynamics to trace the conformational mechanism behind the escape.

Alongside the wet lab I work in computational protein design — Rosetta, ProteinMPNN and AlphaFold2 — including an end-to-end reproduction of the CLAIRE de novo binder-design pipeline, published openly with its debugging narrative. My training spans animal science, basic medicine and chemistry, which is why I move between wet-lab mechanism and computational design rather than choosing between them.

I expect to defend in June 2027 and am seeking postdoctoral positions starting in late 2027. If my work overlaps with your group’s, I’d be glad to hear from you — I’ll gladly send my CV. Write to me at mumumia.1009@gmail.com, or oymzmia@163.com if you are corresponding from within China.